By Joe Powell If incentives for cost-effective clean energy are not put in place, Africa may follow the same dirty industrialisation route of China and India. Environmentalists and poverty campaigners have not always found themselves on the same side of development debates. A basket of contentious subjects that divide the …
Read More »Amid censorship and threats Ugandans turn to new media
By Joe Powell Reliable information in times of crisis is a precious commodity. For many Ugandans, however, news was hard to come by during the three days of rioting in Kampala and the surrounding area. A key reason for this was a significant media crackdown by state security operatives, the …
Read More »Museveni and Obote: birds of a feather that didn’t fly together?
By Joe Powell On April 15th, 1966, self appointed President Milton Obote addressed an emergency session of parliament to present a new constitution and explain why he had suspended Kabaka Edward Mutesa II as President of Uganda. On September 10th 2009, President Yoweri Museveni addressed the nation on the stand-off …
Read More »Broadband for Uganda: The inside story
By Joe Powell July 23, 2009, 159 years after the world’s first submarine cable was laid, will go down in history as the day East Africa became fully connected to the world’s digital super-highways. Seacom’s cable, 17,000km long and costing $650 million, is now officially ‘live’ with a capacity of …
Read More »Makerere’s radical thinker looks higher
By Joe Powell The term of Prof. Livingstone Luboobi, Makerere Universitys Vice-Chancellor, has come to an end. The Independents Joe Powell spoke to the leading reformist candidate to take over the top job, the Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Technology (CIT), Prof. Venansius Baryamureeba. Excerpts below. How …
Read More »EA report exposes Uganda’s most corrupt institutions
By Joe Powell Corruption continues to be endemic in Uganda with bribes either solicited or expected in a startling 35% of service interactions. The first ever East African Bribery index found that Uganda has the dubious honour of having the highest impact bribery in the region. This is measured by …
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